Unconventional maverick?

Before Byron, Mary or Frankenstein came into it, the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley was already the stuff of scandal. Bullied at Eton and nicknamed Mad Shelley, Horsham-born Shelley grew up to be an avowed atheist, an anti-establishment political radical and early pioneer of vegetarianism and free love.

During his lifetime his writing was largely overshadowed by his notorious lifestyle but today he is regarded as one of England’s finest poets, alongside his contemporaries Lord Byron and John Keats.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest of 6 children born to Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley (née Pilfold) at Field Place, on the outskirts of what is now Broadbridge Heath. His younger siblings were Elizabeth, Hellen, Margaret, Mary and John. Timothy Shelley was MP for Shoreham from 1806 to 1818. Timothy’s father, Sir Bysshe Shelley, lived in the relatively modest Arun House in Denne Road, Horsham, preferring it to Castle Goring, his unique double-fronted mansion near Worthing (which is now home to socialite Lady Colin Campbell).

The Shelleys were an established Sussex family but the vast wealth and many estates which were to be Percy’s inheritance came largely from Sir Bysshe’s two marriages to heiresses, both of whom died young. Percy enjoyed a happy country boyhood until he was sent away to school, where he was bullied and nicknamed Mad Shelley for his quick temper and refusal to conform.

And what of his work? His long political epics with their classical allusions can be rather inaccessible to a modern audience (although Jeremy Corbyn recently quoted from the Mask of Anarchy on the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre). His shorter poems however, such as the ever popular Ozymandias, are both of their time and timeless. Shelley grew to despise the older generation of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Southey for recanting in middle age the youthful radicalism and revolutionary fervour which he had once so admired in them. One thing that can be said for Shelley - whatever you think of him - is that he never abandoned the principles by which he lived. But then he never had the chance to grow old.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was drowned whilst sailing in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia, a month short of his 30th birthday.